


religion is like paul rudd. i see the appeal, and i would never take it away from anyone, but i would also never stand in line for it

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Daddy Issues, Human Michael (Supernatural), M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28037319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: With no other option, Adam prays, though he doesn’t really know how. His mother meant to raise him religious, but she didn’t have the time to make it stick. He ended up with a half-hearted, immature kind of faith. He prayed before opening his college acceptance letter, and in the seconds just before a ghoul tore out his throat, but not much besides.“Michael,” he says, clearing his throat when his voice cracks on the way out. He presses his hands together, then, feeling silly, lets them fall into his lap. “I kind of thought it went without saying that you should be here when I got back. Pretty inconsiderate, honestly.” He tries to laugh, but nothing comes out. “If you’re out there— If you’re out there, please come back. Youhaveto come back.”
Relationships: Michael/Adam Milligan
Comments: 28
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I watched 14 seasons of Supernatural in a month and a half last year in what many have described as "a bad choice" and "why??" Had a perfectly pleasant time before moving on with my life. Then I watched season 15 last week and COMPLETELY lost my mind about Michael and Adam... So here we are.
> 
> (Title taken from Community)
> 
> declanapologist on tumblr :)

Adam remembers. He remembers his mother’s screams as she was devoured by ghouls, and he remembers the sharp bite of their teeth in his own flesh, and he remembers the cold terror of the Cage. He remembers, too, what it felt like to cease to exist. Everyone around him seems wonderfully oblivious to the fact that they blinked out of existence. He wonders if he remembers because he didn’t _blink_ , because he was torn, his human soul separated cruelly but meticulously from Michael’s grace. Even after centuries in Hell, the pain was nearly unbearable, although Adam has learned well by now that _unbearable_ doesn’t actually mean anything, that you bear what’s given to you because there's no other choice.

Reappearing, unlike disappearing, was painless, except that he returned to his body and found himself the only occupant. After centuries of forced cohabitation, he thinks he should probably appreciate a bit of solitude, but Michael’s absence is like a missing tooth, bloody and open and impossible to stop poking at. With no other option, he prays, though he doesn’t really know how. His mother meant to raise him religious, but she didn’t have the time to make it stick. He ended up with a half-hearted, immature kind of faith. He prayed before opening his college acceptance letter, and in the seconds just before a ghoul tore out his throat, but not much besides. 

“Michael,” he says, clearing his throat when his voice cracks on the way out. He presses his hands together, then, feeling silly, lets them fall into his lap. “I kind of thought it went without saying that you should be here when I got back. Pretty inconsiderate, honestly.” He tries to laugh, but nothing comes out. “If you’re out there— If you’re out there, please come back. You _have_ to come back.”

He sits for hours on a damp park bench, waiting for someone he knows won’t come. When this strategy proves predictably ineffectual, he goes to the bunker, though he would prefer never to see Sam and Dean again. This is the kind of sacrifice he hopes to rub in Michael’s face when he has him back. He never thought of Sam and Dean as family. His mother, who he’ll never see again, is family. Michael, now, is family. The favored sons of his absentee father aren’t family. He never wanted anything from them, never asked for anything—except in those last, awful moments just before Michael first arrived, when he begged and screamed for a rescue that would never come. That wasn’t their fault, of course; Adam really does try to be fair. 

No matter how hard he knocks, no one appears. He paces until he's depleted the nervous energy that's kept him going, and then he slumps down in front of the door. On Earth, without Michael, he needs to do all the things he’s out of practice with like eating and sleeping and deep-breathing the way his high school guidance counselor recommended for stress reduction. His stomach hurts, and there's a dull ache at his temples, and these are both such absurd, tiny pains that he resents even having to note them.

He hasn't fallen asleep by the time he hears someone approaching, but it’s a very near thing. He doesn’t manage to get to his feet before Sam lopes into view. “Adam!” he says, visibly shocked and unnervingly pleased. He hurries forward, offering one over-sized hand. Adam ignores it, but he can’t control the look on his face, which he knows is soft and vulnerable. Sam runs the rejected hand through his hair. “It’s, uh, good to see you’re all right. Really good.”

“I’m sure,” Adam says. There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this, he knows, but he’s already waited long enough. “I’m looking for Michael. I came back, and he was gone.”

Sam has never had much of a poker face. Adam barely knows him, but he knows that, and he has no trouble reading the truth he’s been trying to deny. He presses his fist to his mouth, his teeth digging into his lip. He isn’t going to break, not now, not with an audience.

“Maybe we should talk about this inside,” Sam says after a long, miserable silence.

Adam allows himself to be ushered in, with Sam’s hand hovering just above his arm, not quite making contact. He refuses to a seat, though he can feel the now-unfamiliar strain in his legs. Sam sits, gets back up, and then stares helplessly around the room. Under better circumstances, Adam might get some pleasure out of his discomfort, but now he can't feel anything through the haze of fear.

Sam tucks his hair behind his ear, and it immediately falls free. He explains what happened in awkward, halting terms—God, his wrath, the nephilim. There are details missing, things Sam is, if not hiding, certainly choosing not to share, but Adam can’t bring himself to care.

“So what happens to angels when they die? He's not just gone, is he?” Adam asks, cutting through the nervous chatter.

“They go to this place called the Empty, and they just sleep. For eternity. Look, Adam, I’m so sorry—“

“But Jack _could_ bring him back, right? If he could restore the entire world exactly the way it was, surely one angel would be nothing.” Adam can feel hope blooming and does his best to tamp it down. Working with the Winchesters has never ended well for him before.

Sam winces. “It's not that simple.”

“Enlighten me,” Adam says coldly. “I’m not some clueless nineteen-year-old anymore. Tell me what really happened.”

Sam's jaw clenches. “Michael—he betrayed us. Betrayed the world. We told him we’d found a way to kill Chuck, and Michael went straight to him.”

Adam nods, keeping his face carefully blank though his heart aches. During their time in the Cage, he and Michael bonded more than either of them actually wanted. It was a bid for survival, literal codependency that later turned into genuine companionship. They had both been forgotten, but while Adam progressed from despair to anger to acceptance, Michael was never able to let go of the tiny germ of hope that kept him from moving on. He couldn’t accept that his father had forsaken him. He convinced himself he deserved his captivity, because considering himself worthy of damnation was easier than the alternative. It was something they had never been able to work through, even after centuries of nothing to do but try. That Michael had opened the gate to Purgatory had been unexpected. That he went back to his father isn’t. That he was killed for it is _galling_. Selfish desire aside, that can’t be the end of Michael’s millenia-long story. Adam won’t let it be.

“But Jack could do it,” he presses.

“That’s really not—“

“He could.”

“Yes,” Sam admits with a sigh. “But Adam, the choice he made— He chose his relationship with his father over the entire world. Over all of humanity.”

Adam thinks briefly of the moment of separation. He felt Michael reaching out for him in the split second they had, felt the tearing and ripping as they were pulled apart. He doesn’t want to explain anything about their relationship to Sam, but he knows he has to. “We were alone together in the Cage for centuries. We only had each other. I only had him, and he only had me. And then. He had no one.”

“He nearly doomed humanity. No, not just humanity, all sentient life on Earth. And you think that’s okay because he was lonely?”

“I think we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Adam looks Sam in the eye. Even after all their time together, he surprised Michael with how angry he wasn’t. It’s not forgiveness, just acceptance. There’s no going back, no changing what happened. “Do you?”

Sam swallows hard and breaks eye contact, staring down at his feet. “I hope so. Look, Adam, it’s not about revenge or whether he deserves to be saved or anything like that. Not entirely. I can’t pretend I’m his biggest fan, but it was a bad way to go. I can certainly sympathize with having a complicated relationship with your father. But we _just_ averted disaster because an overpowered cosmic being decided the world didn’t look the way he wanted. Bringing back the archangel who tried to help him—it’s just not a good idea. Chuck’s still out there. Michael could go to him, try to restore him somehow. I know the two of you bonded, but we can’t endanger the entire world because of it.”

This is rich coming from one of the Winchesters, who have been trading the world for each other for over a decade, but Adam doesn’t bother to say so. He’s biased, but not so badly that he can fail to see Sam’s point. Centuries in hell didn’t quiet Michael’s obedience, and neither did proof of Chuck’s selfishness. There’s no reason to think being demeaned, rejected, and killed would do the trick. Still, he keeps pushing. “You and Dean told me we were family. Whatever that means to you, it sure wasn’t enough to save me from all those years in Hell. If it means anything at all, if it's not just something you said to get what you wanted, I’m asking you for this. He won’t go back to Chuck, not after everything, not if he feels like he has another option.” Adam’s eyes narrow. “Besides, he helped you before. He opened the door to purgatory! We wouldn’t even _be_ here if you guys hadn't screwed something up.”

Sam winces. “You’re right. It hasn't been an easy road.”

“But you still aren’t going to help me.”

“I _want_ to. What we owe you—there’s no way to make up for it. If we can figure out a safe way to give you what you want— Look, do you have a place to stay? We need to figure this out. Dean’s on a hunting trip, and Jack is—" Sam’s eyes flick briefly skyward. “Well, we’ll need time to talk. To plan. And I’m assuming you don’t have money, or an ID, or—“

Adam has both, courtesy of Michael, and a cozy apartment he qualified for using his angel-boosted credit score. He has a job, too, at which he is this very minute no-call, no-showing. He doesn’t want to go back to any of it alone. “Okay,” he says to Sam, who's still working his way up to an invitation.

“Okay?” Sam repeats, and then with some gusto, “Okay!” Splitting the difference, he continues a bit awkwardly, offering a tour of the bunker, which Adam declines, and clean sheets, which Adam accepts only to discover that they aren’t available.

Sam leaves him alone only after a good deal more well-intentioned rambling, and finally Adam finds himself lying on a bare, musty mattress, staring at the ceiling. This is not the life he imagined for himself, not as a teenager and not when Michael pulled him back up to Earth. Then the possibilities had begun to unspool before him, tantalizing and near-limitless, with the only impossibilities being all of the things that had seemed so important the first time around.

He didn’t know, in Hell, that he was in love with Michael. Even once they’d begun to adjust, once Lucifer was gone and Michael was no longer fighting anything but the depleting nature of Hell and his own encroaching self-hatred, it was not a place that bred love. That they survived, minds and moralities intact, was more than enough. It wasn’t until Adam saw Michael in the bright, artificial light of the diner, inspecting a fry with his particular mix of disdain and amusement that he thought— _Oh_. Michael’s projection was, of course, Adam’s own face, but there was something about the way he wore it that felt distinctly _him_ , that made admiring it something other than an exercise in narcissism.

Fortunately, they had by then managed to separate themselves as much as was possible in a single body. In the early days, Adam had been laid utterly open to Michael, his only relief being that Michael considered his thoughts too insignificant to listen to. Michael’s priority had been warring pointlessly with his brother, and Adam had been left to cower in whatever corner he could stake out for himself. It was only when Michael no longer expected salvation to materialize at every turn that they started to communicate with each other, and longer before Adam was able to teach Michael the value of privacy. So Adam had been able to keep his newly-realized feelings to himself, though even worrying about that made him feel petty and young. The bond between them had been strong enough to get them through Hell; any reasonable person would consider that to be more significant than a burst of romantic love. And it was, but he had missed being in love like he had missed greasy burgers and crispy fries. He had missed humanity, and he was thrilled to have it back, even in such a decidedly unhelpful form.

“Hello,” someone says, and Adam looks up to see a kid standing in the room he’s been loaned, one hand up in an awkward, stationary wave. He scrambles to his feet, blood rushing in his ears, but by the time he’s upright, the kid is saying, “Sorry. I should have knocked. I’m always forgetting. I’m Jack.” He holds out his hand to shake, though there’s still most of a room between them. The kid is so enthusiastic that Adam really doesn’t have the will to leave him hanging. He approaches and allows his hand to be pumped up and down with a lot of enthusiasm and very little rhythm. “It’s nice to meet you,” Jack says.

Inexplicably, Adam finds himself smiling. “You too.”

Jack’s face becomes suddenly solemn. “Sam told me what you asked him for.” A long, heavy pause follows, in which Adam finally pulls his hand free. “And he told me he doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

Adam fights down a flare of anger. “Well, what do _you_ think? Sam isn’t the new God, you are.”

“You’re right,” Jack says, not seeming to register the challenge. “But I don’t know what I think. I mean, Sam and Dean are always saying family is important, and if that's true, then I should help. You’re their brother, and Michael is technically my uncle. But Sam’s right that he could be dangerous. I’m still learning, and he’s very powerful, and he knows Heaven better than I do.”

“I know. And I get it. But he won’t do anything. He didn’t even want to go back to Heaven before. He wanted to stay out of all of it. He wanted—" Adam takes a steadying breath, thinking about all of the things Michael wanted and all of the things he didn’t get to have. “He just wanted to live. He just wanted a life.”

Jack nods, his face again crumpled in thought. “I don’t know what the right choice is. I need to think about it. Is that okay?”

Adam is forcibly reminded that Jack, the new God, is only three years old. He supposes he and the son of Lucifer aren't exactly comparable, but he would hate to have the weight of the world on his shoulders like this. “Okay," he says, trying to sound kind. "But can you just tell me, what’s it like? The Empty? Is he in pain?”

Jack seems relieved to finally be able to give him a good answer. “No. He’s asleep. He isn't feeling anything.”

“Oh.” Relief floods Adam’s body. He has no reason to trust Jack, but he finds that he does. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Jack looks around the room and sighs. “I have to go. Running Heaven is really hard! But I’ll think about it. And I’ll be back soon.”

“Soon” apparently means something different to Gods and God-replacements, which Adam has to admit is probably fair. Jack is gone for nearly two weeks, time Adam spends pacing his room and ignoring Sam’s intermittent attempts at reconciliation, though he accepts the food left at his door. He thinks about their apartment, about the milk that’s going bad, the mail that’s piling up, the plants that are dying. They spent hours in the garden section of a home improvement store so that Michael could read the information tags on every plant that caught his eye. He’d been thrilled by the beauty and the variety and the opportunity for choice, and though they’d had money for more, he had insisted on taking home only two after carefully selecting his favorites.

Finally, Jack appears without warning in the middle of Adam’s room. Adam waves away his apologies about having once again forgotten to knock. Jack has a worse poker face than Sam, though he at least has the excuse of being technically a toddler, and it’s clear from his furrowed brows and turned-down lips that he has bad news.

Adam is gearing up for a fight, trying to come up with a convincing argument as to why a supernatural traitor really does deserve a second chance, when Jack says, “I could bring him back. I could give him a new body and everything. But—"

“Really? You’ll really—"

“But I have to take his grace,” Jack finishes awkwardly. “It makes him too dangerous. I can bring him back, but he has to come back human.”

Adam’s heart sinks. In a species motivated by duty and arrogance, Michael stands out. He won’t want to be brought back in a form that he'll consider useless and weak. Still, Adam can’t make himself say no. “Can I have time?” he asks. “I need time. I need to think.”

“Of course,” Jack says, and disappears.

Adam takes another two weeks. The obvious answer, what he suspects is the right one, is that this is a sacrifice too big to make on Michael’s behalf. If he’s asleep in the Empty, like Jack said, then he’s as close to at peace as he’ll ever be. He’s where he belongs, in the afterlife his beloved father designed for him. Bringing him back to face a life without his guiding star and without his abilities is cruel. But it feels wrong that his reward for a life of obedience and service is humiliation and oblivion. Adam knows he should, by now, have shed any remaining naïveté, and he’d thought he had, but now he finds himself thinking words like _unfair_ , and no matter how firmly he tells himself he’s being irrational, he keeps coming back to the concept. It’s _unfair_ for Michael to have died the way he did, _unfair_ to have had his end decided by his father just like every other aspect of his life. It’s one more injustice in a long line of them, and Adam can’t bear it.

He sits down on the edge of the bed that has been his for a month and that he hopes he will never spend another night in. He interlaces his fingers and bows his head. "Jack. My answer is yes," he says, feeling the weight of the decision settle on his shoulders along with everything else. “Bring him back.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: self-harm, depression, references to suicide and non-specifically to Chuck being abusive.

Considering that he’s now responsible for all of creation, Jack seems inordinately proud of having made a single human body, which he snaps into existence on Adam’s bed. His real bed, not the borrowed pallet at the bunker that gave him back pain when he so much as looked at it funny. He figures waking up human will be bad enough for Michael without making him face the Winchesters on top of it.

“Making a person from scratch was _way_ harder than I thought it would be,” Jack says. “This is a copy of someone I met at a gas station. He gave me a dollar when I didn’t have enough for my ice cream. Do you think Michael will like it?”

The honest answer is a resounding _no_. Michael won’t like the body even though the generous gas station customer was _absurdly_ attractive, with high cheekbones, a razor-sharp jawline, and smooth brown skin. Adam figures he owes Jack a lie in return for everything he’s done for them, so he tries to sound sincere when he says, “Yeah, I think so. You did a good job.”

Jack beams, his face lit up with such bright, simple pleasure that Adam’s grateful not to have told the truth. Jack presses a palm flat against Michael’s forehead, saying as he does, “It’s going to take him a couple hours to wake up.” His hand glows briefly golden, and then it’s over, too quickly for Adam to ask him to wait, to say he’s made a mistake, which he’s beginning to suspect he has.

With the job done, Adam expects Jack to blink out of existence like he has every other time they’ve spoken, but instead he stands still in the middle of the room, hands dangling at his sides. Adam, who hasn’t had a houseguest in ten years, latches onto the only thing about Jack that he both knows and understands. “Want some ice cream?”

Jack nods enthusiastically and allows himself to be led into the kitchen, where he accepts a mostly-full pint of Cherry Garcia. “Ice cream doesn’t really taste like it did before,” he says, already stabbing a spoon into the lightly freezer-burned surface. “But it’s still pretty good.”

“That sucks,” Adam says through a full mouth. “I think food might be my favorite part of not being in Hell anymore.”

“Really?”

Adam laughs. “Naw. But it’s top five, easy.”

They eat in silence for a while—relative silence, since Jack chews with his mouth open and occasionally smacks his lips, a table manner deficiency that makes sense since he was essentially raised by the Winchesters. Fighting not to think of Michael lying motionless in the next room, Adam manages to come up with, “Heaven, huh?”

“Yes,” Jack says. “Heaven.”

Adam waits a second before realizing he isn’t planning to continue. “What’s that like?”

Jack shrugs, scraping at the bottom of his pint. “We’re trying to make it better. Instead of everyone being stuck in their own separate heaven, we’re taking down the barriers. It’s hard work, but I get to see my mom. Not a lot right now because there’s so much to do, but it’s good. It is.”

Adam’s heart hurts. He can still remember, sometimes, what it felt like to be the person who trusted the angels without question, who believed in goodness and fairness and happy endings. He had been young and soft, and that’s the person he’d like his mother to remember. He’s just about worked up the nerve to ask about her when Jack sits up straight and looks around. Adam strains his ears but can’t hear anything more than the hum of the refrigerator and the most persistent of the birds that have taken up residence outside the kitchen window. “Michael is waking up,” Jack says.

“Oh, _God_ ,” Adam mutters without thinking. Suddenly it all feels much more real, this thing he’s done. “This will probably go better if you aren’t here,” he says. Then, because Jack’s eyes go wide and sad in a way that makes him feel like he’s just kicked a puppy, “Sorry.”

Jack says, “I understand,” in an unconvincing imitation of his usual good cheer, then disappears before Adam can figure out what to say. Which is for the best, since Adam doesn’t actually have the time or energy to comfort the new infant-God.

Once he’s alone, he listens at the bedroom door, reassuring himself that Michael’s still unconscious before entering. He’s lying like a corpse with his hands folded over his chest. Adam wants to shake him awake, and Adam wants to back slowly out of the room and slam the door behind him, and Adam wants to sit and hold his hand as he makes his way back into the world. Before he can decide which, if any, of these to do, Michael’s eyes fly open, and he says in a voice Adam doesn’t recognize, “What have you done to me?”

— — —

It is not, Adam reminds himself, a good thing that Michael has always depended on his archangel grace and is therefore completely adrift in his new body. Adam knows very well what it’s like to feel weak and out of control, and it’s not something he would wish on anyone, let alone the person who got him through centuries in the depths of Hell. Still, he can’t help but feel a guilty appreciation for Michael’s newfound unsteadiness because it means that everything he throws goes wide or falls short. “Why would you _do_ this to me?” he demands, his voice on the edge of hysteria. He lobs a snow globe that lands a yard from Adam’s feet and doesn’t even break, rolling ineffectually across the carpet. After this last unsatisfying attempt, he resorts to pacing, his movements stiff and jerky. “I was fine. I was _done_. Why would you bring me back like this? Reduce me to _this_?” He swipes angrily at his face, and Adam sees then that he’s crying. He glares at his fingertips and then, hesitantly, licks one and makes a face.

 _Why?_ really isn’t an unexpected question, but Adam still finds himself scrambling because there are so many answers to choose from. He did it for Michael, and he did it for himself, and he did it as a _fuck you_ to the god who killed his mother and left him in Hell and destroyed his own son through millennia of neglect and cruelty. “I wanted you to have another chance,” he says finally, feeling the inadequacy of it as he does. “You didn’t deserve what happened to you.”

Michael’s body goes rigid, his eyes cold and cruel. He’s missing his grace, but he still has the bearing of a warrior. “You know better than anyone that we don’t get what we deserve,” he says, throwing Adam’s final words to Dean in his face. “But you and I both know that isn’t your true reason. You did it—you _did this_ to me because you were _lonely_. After all those years in the Cage, you found yourself alone, and you couldn’t bear it. You brought me back like this for yourself, because you had nothing. No future, no _mother_ —“

“That’s _enough_ ,” Adam says, fighting to keep calm. “I made the best decision I could in a shitty situation, okay? I’m sorry if it wasn’t the right one.”

“ _If_?” Michael repeats.

Adam decides their conversation will go better if he ignores Michael as much as possible and just focuses on the fact that they’re both here. “I mean, obviously I missed you. I came back and you were gone and that was—“ His voice cracks, and Michael’s face softens, just for a second. “It was really awful, but it’s not just that I didn’t want to be alone, even though, duh, I didn’t want to be alone, like pretty much _everyone else in the world_. So maybe it was a little bit selfish. But really, it just felt wrong, you know, for that to be your ending. Everything with your dad—“

Michael turns away. “You shouldn’t talk about things you don’t understand,” he snaps. Adam shuts his eyes against a wave of frustration, reasoning that if his mother had killed him, he’d probably be a pain too. Michael’s shoulders start to shake, and he lets out a horrible animal noise. Adam hesitates, unsure whether approaching him will just encourage more projectiles. “This stupid body you’ve trapped me in is _broken_.”

Adam takes a calming breath, and then another, and then says anyway, “You _know_ what crying is, Michael. You saw me doing plenty of it in the Cage.”

“But it’s not— But I didn’t—“ Michael presses a hand to his chest. “Is it supposed to feel like this? Like something’s ripping apart inside me? Is that right?” He turns his face to Adam, and it’s obvious how scared and miserable he really is.

Adam closes the distance between them, and Michael lets him, too occupied with holding himself together to lash out again. “That’s normal,” he says, squeezing Michael’s arm. “When you feel really bad.”

Michael leans into his touch. “I hate it. I hate this.” Slowly, hesitantly, Adam wraps his arms around him. He’s warm and solid and trembling violently.

“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay,” Adam says, unable to summon anything more reassuring as he drowns in a wave of guilt. He did this. The Cage couldn’t break Michael, propped up as he was by his self-righteousness and his sense of duty and his naive faith in his father. Centuries forgotten in Hell didn’t break him, but Adam has.

Michael doesn’t say anything, so Adam just holds him as he comes apart. Every time he tries to speak, he’s made incomprehensible by shuddering sobs. Adam holds on tighter.

Finally, Michael hiccups to a halt. “It is not,” he says once he’s able to string two words together. He sounds calmer, but only in that he sounds like he’s been emptied out, his voice toneless and bland.

“What?” Adam asks.

“It is not going to ‘be okay,’” Michael says. “I no longer have a purpose. My existence had _meaning_. I was my father’s right hand. I was his warrior. Even after he forsook me, I might have—“ He presses a fist to his mouth like he’s trying to physically force back a sob. “There is always work to be done. In this new world, I might have been of service. And now I’m nothing. I’m _nothing_.”

“You’re not. You’re more than your purpose,” Adam says, just barely louder than Michael’s ragged, unsteady breathing. “You can have a life. It’s really not so bad, just to have a life.”

“That’s not why I was created. I’m not supposed to have a _life_. I was made to serve.”

“And you did serve. You did everything that was asked of you. You did _more_ than was asked of you. You fought your brother, you survived the Cage. And now you can move on. I know it’s not what you wanted. But before any of this, we were going to make a life. A simple life. We can still do that.”

“My father—“ Michael says.

“I know,” Adam says softly.

“You _don’t_ know,” Michael snaps, his anger flaring and almost immediately fading as he continues, “You have no idea. He made me. Everything I know, everything I believe, everything I _am_ is because of him. It’s different for you. Humans were meant to have freedom—free will. To make mistakes. To learn, to change. That is not what angels are for. Without him—“ He looks very young, and Adam is more afraid of him than he’s ever been. Even the memory of their first meeting—banging his fists bloody against the gilded door that separated him from his brothers, his ears ringing, his mouth still tasting of blood—pales in comparison to the terror he feels now. No one has ever needed him like this. He grew up independent because he had to, and he saw that same independence in the people around him. He and his mother lived too close to the edge to risk breaking. He never even saw her _sick_. He has no idea what to do with someone so utterly shattered.

“I gave him everything,” Michael whispers. “And I was nothing to him. He was my world, and I was a tool. A joke. A _supporting character.”_ He turns and presses his face into Adam’s chest like he’s trying to make his way back into Adam’s body. “And yet I’m still. It hurts me to know he’s gone.” Adam clears his throat awkwardly, and Michael finally looks up at him. “He isn’t gone?”

Unbearably, there’s a note of hope in his voice. “Jack took his powers and they let him go, which is—“ Adam catches himself just before he can say he wants Michael’s father dead. “But how can that still matter to you? He killed you.” And then Adam hears himself say, angry and selfish like he so badly doesn’t want to be, “He killed _me_.”

“I am very aware of the situation,” Michael says in clipped, carefully even tones. Adam starts to pull away, but the second there’s daylight between them, Michael cracks, tugging him close again. “I regret that I was unable to protect you,” he says, his words muffled by Adam’s tear-damp shirt. “Of the many, many mistakes I have made over the course of my existence, that is one of the worst.”

“That is not the point. I don’t blame you for that. He’s _God_. Was God. Whatever. There’s nothing you could have done. I just don’t understand how you could still be loyal to him after everything. He _killed_ me. Why do you—“ Adam feels out of control, a runaway train barreling toward a destructive collision. “I’m sorry. This really isn’t the right time.”

Michael pulls free. He looks awkward in his new body, like he’s still learning the boundaries of it. “I believe this is what it feels like to be ‘tired.’ I would like to rest.” He lies down on the bed and shuts his eyes before Adam can decide not to argue.

Adam didn’t sleep in the Cage—of the bits of humanity that were so brutally stripped from him, it was the worst because it denied him a reprieve—and perhaps this is why Michael’s approximation of sleep is so spectacularly unconvincing. He lies on his back, his eyes screwed shut, his hands balled into fists. “ _Oh_ ,” Adam thinks, and he’s grateful, again, for his privacy as he realizes he loves Michael like this too. Small and miserable, in mourning for a genocidal maniac, fresh off an attempt to brain Adam with every souvenir he picked up on their homecoming world tour, Adam _loves_ him. He wants to lie down next to Michael and hold him until he can hold himself together. Instead, he leaves the room, giving him his privacy.

He gets a couple minutes into making lunch, but as he’s filling a pot with water for pasta, he feels all of the energy drain from his body, and he orders pizza instead. He has a healthy bank account—courtesy of Michael—and a wad of blood-stained cash—courtesy of Sam and his too-little-too-late guilt—but he still has to smother a flicker of anxiety at how freely he’s been spending. The anxiety doesn’t stop him from ordering two large pizzas, buffalo wings, and a two-liter of root beer. He is, despite himself and the seriousness of the moment, a bit excited to introduce Michael to food.

Michael hasn’t emerged from the bedroom by the time the food comes. Adam knocks and waits and knocks and waits, and finally Michael says, still in that unnervingly empty voice, “I would like to be alone.” Adam puts two slices of pizza on a plate in the fridge and gets himself a blanket and pillow for the couch.

— — —

Adam gets used to being alone. Michael doesn’t leave the bedroom except to walk, eyes forward, jaw set, to the bathroom, and even this he usually manages to time so that Adam isn’t around. He speaks when spoken to, but only to say that he’s fine and request to be left alone. Adam makes simple meals and leaves them outside the bedroom door. The plates disappear and reappear, sometimes empty, often not. He worries about Michael whenever he's away from the apartment, although Michael seems too listless to actually get into any trouble.

There are so many things Adam missed while he was in the Cage, but—he realizes while clutching a movie ticket in his hand—at some point he started to imagine doing them all with Michael. He wants to ramble on about the right way to butter popcorn while Michael smiles indulgently at him. He wants to bullshit his way through an art museum, making up backstories for the paintings until Michael catches on. He wants to go to a planetarium and listen to Michael talk about the creation of the universe, then respond with a story about his fifth grade field trip. He wants everything he couldn’t have, but he doesn’t want to do any of it alone.

Grocery shopping is one of the only things he enjoys, since he never expected it to be fun in the first place. The first few times, he picks out all the things he badly wanted as a kid but knew better than to ask his mother for—the brand-name sugary cereals, the tiny, expensive packs of Gushers some kids always had with their packed lunches. For an entire week he eats nothing but Lunchables.

Then he starts to feel achey and tired, and he has to cast his mind back to remember the last time he ate a vegetable. It hits him then that he’s not a teenager anymore. It’s strange; he feels simultaneously ancient and very young. After some experimentation, he finds that he likes meal-planning, likes finding recipes online and reading the six paragraphs of narrative pablum before getting to anything about cooking, likes taking long lists to the store and carefully checking each item off, likes when the total comes out to exactly what he calculated it to be. He likes, also, to sit in the parking lot and peel and eat an apple and pretend that none of this happened to him, that he finished school and became a doctor and his mom clapped and cried at his graduations.

He returns from a particularly long trip and finds Michael sitting at the kitchen table holding a butcher’s knife to his arm, a determined look on his face. He’s so focused that he doesn’t seem to notice Adam standing there, frozen. After a horrible, heart-stopping moment, Adam registers with relief the clean blade and the unbroken skin. Unwilling to take either for granted, he rushes into the room, letting one of the bags slip off his wrist as he does so. He yanks the knife from Michael’s hand. “What are you _doing_?”

Michael blinks up at him. “The way this body processes pain is unfamiliar to me. I hoped to learn about it.”

Adam’s heart begins to calm. “So you weren’t trying to…”

“To what?”

“To—I don’t know, punish yourself? Kill yourself?”

“Of course not,” Michael says, brow furrowed. “It would be wrong. Life is a divine gift, even this one I would prefer not to have. To waste it would be unacceptable.”

“Right.” Adam shuts his eyes against a looming sense of exhaustion. “Well, you can’t do this.” He catches himself gesturing with the hand holding the knife and sets it down on the counter out of Michael’s reach.

“And why shouldn’t I? You’ve taken it upon yourself to decide who I should be, but surely you don’t think you’re in charge of every aspect of this new life you’ve foisted upon me.”

“You could die doing this. It doesn’t matter what you _think_ you were doing, you could die.”

Michael scoffs. “These bodies of yours. So fragile. So absurd. It’s exhausting.”

Adam turns back to the bag he abandoned on the floor. He expects Michael to vanish into the bedroom, but he doesn’t move, watching while Adam wastes nearly an entire roll of paper towel cleaning up the jar of pasta sauce that shattered on impact. “So why didn’t you do it?” Adam asks once he’s done, rinsing his hands and watching reddened water swirl down the drain.

“Excuse me?” Michael asks, his voice crisp.

“I mean, please don’t take this as a challenge or something, but. You hesitated.”

Michael stares down at the weathered surface of the table. “I did not want to hurt,” he says finally.

Adam breathes a sigh of relief. “Michael, that’s a good thing. That’s how you’re supposed to feel.”

“As a warrior,” Michael starts and then stops. His face contorts wildly before going blank again. “Well, I suppose you’re right, as I am not a warrior any longer,” he says in that same horrible, empty voice. “If you’ll excuse me.” He moves quickly to the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

Adam slumps over to the couch and collapses onto it. Then, thinking better of it, he gets up and opens the bedroom door. Michael is lying silently on the bed, eyes trained on the ceiling. “I think. Maybe we should leave this open,” Adam says awkwardly.

Michael doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t get up and close the door once Adam’s back on the couch, so he tries to consider it a win.

Adam takes to pacing the apartment while Michael sleeps. He keeps the windows open even when the wind whistles through the rooms at night. He chats up the pizza delivery man, holding the tip hostage just for a few minutes’ conversation. He starts to dream. Sometimes he dreams of his mother, whose face is no longer as crisp in his memory as he’d like it to be. Sometimes he dreams of a monster tearing into his flesh. Sometimes he dreams of being buried alive and wakes up gasping, still tasting dirt in his mouth.

The apartment seemed so luxurious when he and Michael first walked through it. They took a tour led by a realtor who was ten minutes late and checked his watch whenever Adam wanted to linger in a particular room. Michael flew them in after-hours so that Adam could look properly. He had never lived anywhere but his mother’s house and his shoebox of a dorm. He had never had a place that was his own, and it had been thrilling to walk through the rooms and decorate them in his mind. The same rooms that had been perfectly-sized when they were one body are claustrophobic now that they’re two.

Michael starts to emerge from the bedroom at least once a day, but he doesn’t speak unless spoken to, his tearful anger having melted into a tired silence. He wakes up in the morning and eats what Adam puts in front of him and then continues to sit at the kitchen table looking both blank and resentful. He sometimes allows Adam to teach him things, human things, like washing dishes and doing laundry and making the perfect grilled cheese, tasks he performs with neither complaint nor enthusiasm. Then, inevitably, he returns to the bedroom and lies silent and unmoving.

— — —

Michael’s curls are short enough and tight enough that his lack of maintenance isn’t immediately obvious. Adam doesn’t notice until he finds Michael sitting in front of the bedroom vanity and clutching a comb with several teeth broken off. As Adam approaches, he can see that Michael’s hair is badly matted, and it occurs to him that he really hasn’t been looking. He hasn't wanted to look at Michael too closely.

“This is not supposed to be painful,” Michael says flatly. “I am nearly certain of it.”

Adam can see the section Michael tried to detangle, slightly elevated above the rest of it. He takes the comb without making Michael ask, but when he works it into his hair and pulls upward, he meets what feels like an actual wall of resistance.

Michael’s face remains stony and impassive. “So it _is_ supposed to be painful?” he asks. “I thought perhaps I was doing it wrong.”

“It’s not.” Adam presses a finger into Michael’s hair and leaves a dent. “It’s just that you’re supposed to do it every day.”

“And how should I have known that?”

Adam sighs. There are just so many things Michael doesn’t get. He’s been trying, and that’s almost worse than when he was lying silently behind a closed door. Adam doesn’t want to confront how unhappy he’s made him. “Honestly I think we might need to shave your head. Is that all right?” He expects an apathetic shrug. Since coming halfway out of his funk, Michael hasn’t expressed a single desire. He does what Adam asks of him and nothing more. Adam tried to push once, asking him to stay in the living room instead of returning to the bedroom, and he obliged without complaint, sitting silently on the couch until Adam told him he didn’t have to. It makes Adam itch. Michael is not the blank, personality-less soldier he’s pretending to be. He never was, and Adam knows that better than anyone.

“No,” Michael says, and then goes stiff. Adam’s hands freeze in his hair. “No,” he says again, with some amount of wonder. “That is not what I want.”

Part of Adam—the part that’s stir-crazy and traumatized and still hasn’t gotten to talk through having been killed and apparently forgotten—wants to tell Michael to solve his own problems, but the rest of him is able to recognize the significance of what just happened. “Fine,” he says. “Let me think.”

— — — 

“I’m doing this once, dude,” Adam says two hours later, having watched several Youtube tutorials on natural hair, then ventured outside to find a beauty supply store his eyes have always slid right past, its windows papered over with posters for hair extensions. He was the only white person in the store, and he felt weird, then felt weird for feeling weird. On the way to the registers, his eyes caught on a pair of diamond studs kept safe under glass, which seemed excessive since they were clearly marked with an orange sticker that read “$7.99.”

He leans over Michael to set his purchases on the vanity. The videos recommended different products, so he just bought all of them. He pulls out several pots of grease in varied bright hues, then several tubs with butters and oils he’s never heard of. Each meets the varnished wood with a satisfying thwack. Michael watches him in the mirror, looking more interested than he has in weeks. Adam puts the earrings down last. He’d asked for them on impulse. The bored-looking Asian woman who retrieved them smirked at him, but he was pretty sure she thought he was badly fucking up an anniversary, not trying a new look. “When I’m done with this, you can pay me back by piercing my ear.” He wonders if people still talk about the gay ear and has to stifle a laugh. “We’ll get a needle and some ice and you can just—“ He mimes jabbing himself.

Michael sits up even straighter, somehow, and twists around to stare at Adam in horror. “I would never hurt you.”

“You wouldn’t be _hurting_ me. It’s a thing middle school girls do at sleepovers. You’d be saving me the twenty bucks it’d cost to get it done at the mall.” Adam shrugs, picking up a comb with space for an entire finger between each tooth. “But I can just do it myself. No problem.”

“I’ll do it!” Michael says hurriedly. He turns to face forward again, but avoids Adam’s eyes in the mirror. “You have done so much for me. I can do this.”

It’s the first time Michael has described his circumstances as something other than an unbearable curse. Adam tries not to smile too wide. “Thanks.”

The situation with Michael’s hair isn’t so difficult to fix; it just requires time and care, two things Adam hasn’t had much of recently. But he finds he doesn’t mind so much now. Michael relaxes under his touch, shutting his eyes as Adam works through his hair.

“I want this to work,” Adam says, when he’s gotten Michael’s hair detangled and is just touching it for the joy of it, because it’s soft and sweet-smelling and _Michael’s_. It’s a couple inches long when combed out, and it curls under his fingers. “Can we talk about it?”

Michael doesn’t nod or shake his head. Adam waits, and after a minute of silence and avoided eye contact, Michael says, “Well, are you going to talk?”

Adam chuckles. “Fine. I was nineteen when we went to Hell. We spent ten years—more than half of my _life_ at that point—down there. Those are years I will never get back. I had a plan for how I wanted my life to turn out, and I had this person I thought I’d become, and now I can never have that life, and I can _never_ be that person.” He stops, silenced by a stab of pain in his chest. He swallows his regret and his sadness so that he can continue, “And that makes me unhappy. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve really even started to process it.”

Michael stares down at his hands. “I’m sorry. This is not what I intended for you.”

Adam shakes his head. “No, that’s not my point. I’m not talking about me.”

“I hate to be contrary, but you very much are.”

“Okay, fair. But what I’m trying to say is, yeah, it’s sad that I didn’t get to live that life, but I get to live _this_ one. I have another chance, and I don’t know how yet, but I’m going to make the most of it. It's scary and awful, but it’s also kind of exciting. That’s why I asked Jack to bring you back. Because you deserve that same chance. I know ten years isn’t that long for you. Even in Hell years, I guess it’s not that long, but it’s not like you really got to live before that. You were always doing your duty. I wanted you to have what I have, a _chance_. And no matter what you say about what angels are meant for, I was with you in the Cage all those years, so you can’t fool me into thinking you don’t have plenty of personality. I know you’re smart and funny in a dry kind of way, and you’re really kind, at least to me, and I think the world is a worse place without you in it, but that’s me being selfish again. It’s just. I miss who I was before, but I'm grateful that I get to figure out who I am now. I figured maybe you could too. Does that make sense?”

Michael thinks it over, appearing for the first time to be something other than willfully difficult. Adam waits, anticipation mounting, only for him to say, “It doesn’t. But. Thank you. That’s very kind.”

— — —

Every morning, Adam wakes up convinced that he’s finally going to confront Michael about custody of the bedroom. When shopping, he hadn’t been able to totally overcome his lifelong frugality, and the couch is from a thrift store and perfectly adequate for watching movies. Once he’s fully horizontal and has his eyes closed, it seems to sprout a half-dozen new lumps and loose several springs that prick at his skin. Michael always looks miserable though, and Adam remembers that he trapped him into this life, and it seems wrong, under the circumstances, to take things away from him. He could get a better couch or a second mattress, but somehow, for some reason, he doesn’t. Being alone in his body isn’t lonely the way he thought it would be. It’s satisfying to want to lift his arm and then to lift it with none of the negotiation that filled their years in the Cage. It’s nice just to be himself, even if he doesn’t know quite who that is just yet. It’s strange, though, to be separated from Michael, who still spends most of his time in the bedroom, usually lying down with his back to the always-open door.

He’s only barely nodded off on a night over a month into Michael’s resurrection when suddenly he’s being prodded awake. He startles at the sight of Michael looming over him, still not quite used to this face that isn’t a carbon copy of his own. “What’s wrong?”

“Is that comfortable?” Michael asks. “I recall how excited you were to purchase your mattress.”

“It’s fine,” Adam lies, resisting the urge to crack his back.

“It isn’t. You have always been an abysmal liar. Now come with me.” Michael turns and walks away with the confidence of someone accustomed to being obeyed. Adam appreciates the flash of his old personality, and is sick of waking up with a stiff neck, so he trails Michael into the bedroom and eyes the half of the mattress that’s been saved for him. Michael is already lying on his side facing the wall. “I have very little practice, as you know, but I will endeavor to be a considerate sleeper,” he says.

Adam laughs, his amusement nearly but not quite dulling his nerves. It’s easy not to think about being in love with Michael when he’s just a depressive storm cloud floating through the apartment. It’s harder now, faced with the prospect of sharing a bed. Michael looks like himself, somehow, even in a new form. It’s something about the way he holds himself. Adam’s body recognizes him.

“We have shared a body,” Michael says after an awkward silence. “Surely a mattress is less extreme.”

He’s right, obviously. Besides, Adam misses being close to him, just a bit more than he misses his mattress, which is one of those customizable ones with its very own remote that he’d seen in commercials as a kid and always considered the very height of luxury. He hadn’t actually needed a mattress before their forced separation, but it was something he’d always wanted and was suddenly allowed to have. Michael had laughed at his excitement as he talked to the salesman, allowing himself to be upsold on heating and cooling features but finally drawing the line at cupholders.

Michael scoots closer to the wall when he gets in, leaving a massive space between them. Even under two comforters, Adam feels cold.

He wakes up in the morning having worked the blankets most of the way off his body. Still groggy, he wiggles his icy toes and can’t figure out why he’s burning up. It doesn’t seem too important, and he drifts off again, repeating the cycle twice before finally waking up enough to realize that Michael is clutching him and radiating heat like a furnace, his arm around Adam’s waist, their legs intertwined. It’s still a shock, how solid he is now. Not a projection, not a ball of angelic grace working Adam’s limbs. Another body, who can share a bed and drool a bit and nuzzle Adam’s neck in his sleep. Adam wonders whether it’s wrong to enjoy this, whether it retroactively proves him selfish.

Michael wakes up slowly, which isn’t what Adam would have expected from God’s greatest warrior. There’s a lot of blinking, a lot of yawning, and a rather heart-stoppingly cute moment in which he tugs the blanket over his head before he’s finally close enough to consciousness to catalog all the places their skin touches. He goes very still, all traces of grogginess gone from his face, and then he pulls free all at once. “I apologize,” he says, turning his back to sit on the edge of the bed. “I did not anticipate such a high degree of physical contact. If you would prefer, I will sleep on the couch from now on.”

Michael’s embarrassment calms Adam’s, so that it’s easy for him to say, “It’s fine. Like you said, what’s a little cuddling between two guys who spent a millennium in the same body?”

“I don’t believe that’s what I said.”

Michael sleeps in his clothes; Adam makes a mental note to teach him about pajamas. He tried and failed to engage Michael in the process of buying clothing for his new body, which is a couple inches shorter than him and slight but well-muscled. He ended up ordering some bland basics that fit surprisingly well. Instead of any of those, Michael’s wearing one of Adam’s favorite shirts, a t-shirt from a concert he attended in his former life. He found it in a thrift store and nearly cried as he ran his hands over the worn-soft fabric.

Michael gets up, holding himself rigidly. “I should begin the laborious morning routine this body requires.” Adam laughs and is rewarded with the slow relaxing of Michael’s posture. It took centuries to get him to loosen up in the Cage; Adam’s grateful to see that his work wasn’t totally undone by the unsolicited resurrection.

“I’m happy you’re here,” he says to Michael’s back. “I know you aren’t, and I don’t blame you. But I am.” The last bit of tension drains from Michael’s back, and he slumps down onto the mattress. Adam reaches across the divide and squeezes his shoulder. He wants to make impossible promises: that he’ll get Michael’s grace back, that he’ll fix things with Chuck, that they’ll be happy together. “I guess it’s not worth much, but—“

“It’s worth a lot,” Michael says, laboring over each word. “I am not happy, but. It is worth a lot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got away from me a little bit... Thanks for reading! Comments are always appreciated if you're enjoying the story. And I'm screaming about midam on tumblr @declanapologist


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